Shared resources, such as web content, are reputedly difficult to navigate where the quantity and quality of such resources is vast and diverse. For example, researching a particular topic through a vast collection of websites can be time consuming and of variable effectiveness. Search engines provide facilities for identifying relevant search terms in large shared resource repositories, although the usefulness of search results can vary significantly. Users can rate sites relating to a particular topic or activity in order to provide feedback to other users. However, such rating requires a conscious proactive effort on the part of the user to review and evaluate shared resources and provide the feedback. Ill-considered or inadequately expressed feedback can be unhelpful and sometimes misleading.
The website “del.icio.us” provides a personal bookmarking site offering users a facility for bookmarking websites of interest. Bookmarked sites can be associated with tags to aid retrieval. Grouping of sites is possible by collecting all sites with common tags. In this way, the “del.icio.us” facility relies on the subjective interpretation of the relevance of a site to a particular topic by a user, and further requires the user to take a proactive approach.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide for the identification of relevant shared resources for a requested topic or activity without requiring proactive participation of users and without depending on a subjective assessment of a user.